


Two Hearts

by M1ssUnd3rst4nd1ng



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: (I got no other way she's supposed to look so why not), AO3 won't let me add it to the series right now, Alternate Universe - Human, Angst, Especially in this, Eventual Happy Ending, Eventual Romance, F/M, Her name is Tara Disarro, His name is John Smith, Human, In Which The TARDIS Is Human and Has Always Been Human, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, No Smut, Non-graphic illness and injury and medical treatment, Not the human!TARDIS from "The Doctor's Wife", Once more I must begin by objecting to the character tag "The DOCTOR'S TARDIS", Or do ANs, Part of a series but can stand alone, Romance, She's her own person, Some kissing eventually, Terminal Illnesses, The Doctor is also human, Though she is inspired in part by her and presumably looks like her, Warning: terminal illness and associated thoughts and emotions, it gets heavy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:34:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26498713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/M1ssUnd3rst4nd1ng/pseuds/M1ssUnd3rst4nd1ng
Summary: Tara Disarro has always been dying, but now she's running out of time to do some living first. Until she meets the doctor that is going to change the rest of her life.
Relationships: First Doctor/The Doctor's TARDIS, The Doctor & The Doctor's TARDIS, The Doctor/The Doctor's TARDIS
Kudos: 1





	Two Hearts

Being born with a rare and most likely fatal heart condition had granted Tara Disarro three things very early in life: the understanding that life is short and precious, the realization that too many people spend too much time worrying about things that don't ultimately matter or that can't be changed, and the determination that she would never worry about such things and would instead live what life she had as fully as possible.

Unfortunately, she was the only member of her family granted these things by her diagnosis.

The rest of them were instead exactly the type to worry about all the wrong things, to waste time fussing over schedules and the weather and what other people thought. The type who lived in a boring grey monotony of their own making, brushing past every hint of color before it had time to bloom instead of savoring it, sucking the life out of it with the draft in their wake, and never adding any color of their own to the world.

The grey of the world around her suffocated her more thoroughly and more excruciatingly than her own failing body.

She escaped as often as she could, in mind because she couldn't in body, yet. She read everything she could get her hands on, vicariously living adventures and tragedies and romances, visiting outer space and realms of fantasy and exotic places on her own planet; she stared into the myriad colors swirling through the depths of space for hours on end; and she dreamed, day and night, of her own future travels. Dreamed of fleeing the drudging grey of doctor's visits and stuffy schools and parent-approved safe activities for the vast green jungles of South America or the wide blue skies of the western United States or the browns and golds of the deserts of North Africa or the red and orange and purple of the bazaars of Asia. Fiery sunsets over frozen tundras. The sea, the depths of its calm and the height of its fury. She yearned to experience the full spectrum of life, to meet strangers and learn things and wander forgotten places and eat foods she'd never heard of, to spread her wings and fly. She planned to live, in spite of her limitations.

She had even planned the first trip: as soon as she'd graduated from the prestigious school her parents had sent her to and reached legal adulthood, she'd be off to step foot in every ocean in the world and to gaze at the stars from both hemispheres and see both the Northern and the Southern Lights, with a few carefully plotted stops along the way.

She almost bought the train ticket for the first leg.

* * *

The news shouldn't have been as much of a surprise as it was. This was always coming and she knew her body with the hyperawareness that only chronic illness can bring, knew that she'd been struggling lately, as bad as it had been during some of the really bad times, but she'd hoped against all reason, had tried her best to ignore the signs and convince herself that it was all in her head, that it was the stress of her final year of school and nerves about finally leaving and nothing serious, that she'd been through worse.

It wasn't in her head. She hadn't been through worse.

Her heart had finally reached its limits, the doctors told her after they'd spent weeks gravely shaking their heads and finally run out of tests. It was all downhill from here. If they ever did find the rare donor heart she needed, it probably wouldn't be until it was too late. There were treatments that could ease the symptoms, extend her life by months or years, but she would be all but bound to the hospital for that time and it still might not be long enough. End stages, they called it, and started talking about how _if_ she made it the last few months to adulthood, she should start thinking about her choices for what measures she did or didn't want them to take when it came down to it, what she wanted done _after_.

She cried. Not right away, but after they'd all left her alone to rest. Laid in the not-quite-dark, not-quite-quiet of a hospital room and sobbed until her head and chest ached and her throat was raw and her body felt completely drained and she'd almost forgotten where she was.

She was seventeen, and she was going to die.

She'd always known she was going to die someday, earlier than most. Had always known it was going to be a slow process, gradually weakening until she just stopped. Had hoped it wouldn't be like this.

She hadn't graduated.

Hadn't reached adulthood and freedom.

Hadn't travelled more than a few miles from her home except to visit specialists, had never left the country.

Hadn't seen and tasted and smelled so many things.

She wasn't afraid of dying, even now. She was achingly disappointed she hadn't lived first. She was angry and depressed that she was going to spend what time she had left trapped inside this soul-sucking, neutral-toned bubble outside of time and space except for brief, supervised day trips, sometimes.

She wallowed for two days before he showed up. Dr. John Smith, newly-minted doctor and very proud of it. Youngest graduate ever from his particular medical school—so he said when she commented on his age—and even more proud of that.

He was trying so hard to be serious and impressive, to hide his excitement and curiosity behind a stoic façade, but she'd always been a student of life and she saw right through it. Plus, there were stethoscopes of every color on his bright red socks and the lines from a heart monitor on his braces in brilliant blue-green.

He puffed up like a peacock when she said he looked too young to be a real doctor, tugging at the lapels of his oh-so-official white coat, bouncing forward on his toes once with a twinkle in his eyes and proud joy radiating from every pore, and she smiled for the first time in days.

He fumbled through her check-up, unfamiliar with the paperwork in his hands and awkward in his bedside manner, and she laughed for the first time in even longer. She laughed so hard that it set off the heart monitor and brought a flurry of doctors and nurses, so hard that she wheezed for a solid ten minutes after, oxygen mask in place, so hard that tears obscured her vision enough that she almost missed his bluster and embarrassment and nerves and worry. She didn't miss, once she was settled enough, that concern gradually melt into a slow, creeping smile, pleased that she was happy.

He came back the next day, shy but with the same slow smile twinkling in his eyes; he wore bright green socks with bones on them and the same braces. He inquired into how she was feeling with the same awkwardness while checking over the equipment and her chart with the same bumbling unfamiliarity and she laughed again, helpless little giggles that turned him red. He wouldn't meet her eyes. It wasn't until he left, shooting a boyish grin over his shoulder at the doorway and telling her he wasn't this bad with his other patients, it's just that she's so pretty and has such a nice laugh that she flustered him silly, that she realized he'd done it on purpose to make her laugh. She couldn't stop smiling.

The third time he made her laugh—the day after that—she knew he was doing it on purpose, told him as much, but he simply put on his stuffiest air, hands gripping his lapels and nose slightly in the air, and informed her that he had no idea what she was talking about. He was wearing pink socks with anatomically correct hearts on them.

He visited almost every day, even when her room was assigned to another doctor and he had to do it in his time off, checking over her machines and chart meticulously and chatting. When she was improved enough to be off the machines, he walked her to physical therapy telling silly jokes as gravely as possible. When she had to go back on the machines, when she was too exhausted from another round of treatment to do more than lay blankly in bed, he'd distract her with long, funny stories, told as dramatically as possible—the greyer her world, the more colorful he became. He never left until she laughed at least once and he always smiled that slow, beautiful smile once she had, as proud of himself for that as any other accomplishment.

The first time she made him laugh was mostly unintentional; she was making a joke, yes, but too few shared her sense of humor for her to expect a laugh from anyone else. He had mentioned, upon seeing her lunch tray, that the hospital was out of pudding and that he was quite put out because he very much enjoyed the pudding and his day just didn't feel right without at least one serving of hospital pudding. "Poor dear," she said, eyebrow quirked and suppressing a smile, then gestured to the machine and the wires connecting it to her chest, "I'm heartbroken."

He snorted, then instantly turned red and covered his mouth. Until she laughed. Then he smiled that slow smile of his.

"Well," he said, hands going to his lapels and nose going up, "I can fix that, but I can't fix the pudding, so I'd say I'm rather worse off at the moment."

She laughed so hard she wheezed and coughed and he spilled flustered, worried apologies as he held the oxygen mask in place. She shook her head and when she could finally talk again told him not to worry about it, that she was pleased someone else shared her sense of humor and had just been surprised. She kept reassuring him until he smiled again, even if the smile was hesitant, and she became determined to make him laugh again.

"Perhaps," she tried, smiling slyly up at him, "this is why they called me 'Disaster' at school, because it truly takes talent to turn a joke about pudding into a minor medical emergency."

It worked.

What's more, it sparked a conversation about names. He told her how many times he'd gotten into sticky situations when people assumed "John Smith" to be a fake name; she teased him relentlessly that it actually was a fake name and told him that she couldn't believe it was real because it was far too boring to suit him. He laughed more and told her that he thought her very interesting name suited her perfectly.

They talked more freely after that.

The weeks turned into months. She improved and worsened by turns. He kept coming by, even (especially) in his free time, and staying longer. And she was happy, even at her worst.

* * *

He was a wanderer at heart the same as she was.

He told her dozens, hundreds of stories of his time spent traveling up and down the length of Britain looking for adventure and work after the death of his parents and before medical school, and when he talked of those times he focused on the details that had always mattered the most to her in her imaginings. He talked about the people he'd met and the stories they'd shared, talked about plants and animals and sunsets and waterfalls and spectacular forests ablaze with autumn. He talked about camping under the open sky, focusing on the majesty of the stars and the inimitable feeling of sitting at a campfire with no distractions rather than the reason he'd been camping out. Even the more dangerous incidents he described as adventures and learning experiences. She hadn't asked him these details; he spoke of them because they were the details that mattered the most to him as well.

She told him all the things she wanted to do before she died, even the silly things that others would have made fun of her for. She told him that she wanted to float in the Dead Sea, wanted to swim in the Nile, wanted to ride a gondola through the canals of Venice. She told him she wanted to hear the echo of her shout in the Grand Canyon. That she wanted to watch the sun rise over the east coast of North and South America, Australia and Africa, and set over the west coast of the same, that she wanted to watch it rise over the Japan and set over the Mediterranean. That she wanted to touch the sand at the foot of the Great Sphynx just to know what it felt like. That she wanted to sing at the Sydney Opera House, not well but enthusiastically.

She told him of the places she read about that she wanted to see with her own eyes and he told her the places he'd dreamed of in return. He brought in his atlases, well-thumbed with notes in a looping, circular hand in the margins and pictures and lists tucked between the pages, to compare to her well-loved ones with flower and leaf pressings and note sheets inside. And then he brought in new ones for them to study together, leaving all three kinds in what was fast becoming their stack of books.

Eventually he brought in a map to tack on the wall and chart out their adventures. They put colored pins in every place they wanted to go, blue for her and red for him until they realized there were too many places they both wanted to go, and then they compromised and added green pins for both.

Somewhere along the way, without really saying it, those green pins became places they wanted to go together, accompanied by their trusty, well-used atlases.

* * *

She told him once about how much she loved the stars, how she related to the concept of the dark of night revealing the bright spots that were always there and how beautiful they were and how the fact that they were so mysterious and unexplored piqued her curiosity. She rambled on forever about stars and for the first time the person she was talking to didn't even look bored, let alone ask her to stop. In fact, he smiled the whole time, his eyes twinkling like the stars she was describing and making her wax even more poetic than normal about their beauty.

And when she finally finished, he told her that he loved the stars, too. That he loved her reasons, and that one of his favorite things about the stars was that people all over the world looked up at the same stars and that all those people looked up and tried to find patterns and made up stories about the figures they found there that they could relate to. He rambled on for forever about the constellations of different cultures, the constants and differences; she'd never thought of that angle before, but as he talked she found herself falling in love with it. He told her that people were made of the same things stars were, that there was stardust in her bones.

The next time she was gone for an intensive round of treatment, just a few days later, there were stars on her ceiling when she returned and some of his books on constellations and their mythologies next to her bed. He held the books for her through the next few days because she couldn't, held them at an angle that must have been awkward for him so that she could see all the pictures and charts as he read them to her in his quiet, steady voice. When she was feeling a bit better again, she talked him through rearranging the stars on her ceiling to a more accurate depiction of her favorite constellations (and some of his, too), lying on her bed surrounded by books notated in his loopy handwriting. And on her first really good day after that, he stole her away for a starlit picnic on the roof of the hospital and they traced out what constellations they could find for real and chatted long into the night about anything and everything.

Every night, she stared at her stars before falling asleep and thought of the hope they represented, of the unity and curiosity of people, and of eyes that twinkled with a slow, steady smile.

* * *

She loved butterflies, she shared once, offhand, several months in. She'd been talking to some of the other long-term patients like she did when she was well enough to go down to their shared day room and they got on the subject of hope and the outlook of terminal patients and how everybody responded just a little different. It had been a rousing conversation and she'd enjoyed it very much, but there were a lot of people involved and a lot of things to think over and she hadn't quite sorted her own thoughts, let alone fully expressed herself, so she talked it over again with him later. She told him then how people always talked about spreading your wings in terms of birds breaking free of cages, but that she'd always liked butterflies better because they broke free of the cages that were their own bodies to spread their wings and that spoke to her more. She said how caterpillars could be a bit boring but butterflies tended to be more exciting, and that she'd read somewhere that scientists had proven that the butterflies still held all the memories and behavioral tendencies of the caterpillars they once were, that they made themselves over and spread their wings but didn't change who they were as individuals, and that that felt like hope to her. Plus, of course, butterflies were so often the most gorgeous colors, like stained glass.

Then she'd gone off on a discourse about stained glass and they'd had an animated discussion about their mutual interest in it and she'd forgotten she ever told him about the butterflies. (That was how easy it was to talk to him at that point; she'd put into words some of her deepest feelings like she never had before and didn't think twice about it.)

She forgot until the day he showed up on his day off with a stained-glass butterfly meant to be mounted on a window and—with his hands on his lapels and his nose in the air and a concerted effort to hide just how excited and nervous he was—very formally asked her if she would care to accompany him to a butterfly garden.

The gardens were beautiful, a conservation effort to maintain and grow species that were in danger of going extinct, not just butterflies but flowers and bees as well, bursting with color everywhere the eye landed. She could have happily spent a week solid in them, were it not for her health and the fact that her companion was a doctor paying very close attention.

She did learn that day, though, that he very much liked bees. He liked that they were very dedicated to one particular task and liked that these humble creatures going about a simple task had such a profound impact on the world around them. Bees, he told her, did nothing more than gather pollen that they could turn into honey to feed themselves and raise their young, and yet through their efforts they single-handedly maintained entire ecosystems of pollen-bearing plants and their honey could be used not just as a sweetener but as a remedy for a number of medical uses. She found herself fascinated by his descriptions and caught him a bee in cupped hands for him to admire; he cooed over the thing, calling it marvelous, and she thought she might happily fill her room full of bees. She bought a stained-glass bumblebee window decoration from the gift shop before they left and he mounted it next to her butterfly when they returned, smiling all the while.

When, a few weeks later, they learned origami together, they made dozens of butterflies of every color to pin to the wall opposite their map and dozens of flowers to go underneath. And then she learned how to make little yellow bees to add in among them and was rewarded with a slow smile and twinkling eyes.

The light streaming through her growing collection of stained-glass butterflies spread light over that wall and the one adjoining it, and her once neutral-toned room was a riot of color.

* * *

She had noticed about a week after making his acquaintance that his eyes were grey. It had taken that long for it to register because they were not flat and boring, like she usually associated with the color. His eyes were the grey of dawn breaking fresh and promising, the grey of a vast ocean teeming with life, the grey of a comfortable pause between waking and sleeping when everything is perfect, the grey of rolling storm clouds crackling with lightning. They twinkled with a smile, even when he wasn't quite smiling, sparked with curiosity and passion, lit with intelligence—they were so _alive_. They were _colorful_.

She noticed all this after a week.

It was several months before she noticed how utterly in love with them she was. She loved them as much as she loved his smile, because she couldn't separate the two, loved them as she loved the stars, loved them as she loved adventure. She loved the way they danced and the way they stilled and hardened with concern or concentration. She loved them so much she thought they might have permanently changed her perception of the color grey.

She told him, eventually, that she _liked_ his eyes. Told him, furthermore, her (former) perception of the color grey and the world around her so that he understood how profound it was that she liked his eyes, not even in spite of their color but because of their color (because he was the thing she'd never expected, in so many ways).

He told her in return—shy, hands gripping at his lapels for dear life—that he found her eyes intriguing. He said they were young eyes still full of curiosity and wonder and hope but that they were old eyes too, full of the grief and wisdom that came from her experiences. Brand-new and ancient, he said, and the bluest blue ever.

* * *

They had a glorious year together. They talked about things they'd done and everything they wanted to do. They talked about fiction and traded their favorites back and forth. She read books about history and culture and dictionaries in foreign languages and told him about them when he had breaks from his busy schedule. On his days off he'd sit with her or take her out to museums and parks. She was dying, but for maybe the first time she was _living_. Her life had brightened over the course of that year as steadily as her hospital room had filled with color. She couldn't go out and see the world, so her doctor had brought the world to her, and in the process he'd stolen her heart, faults and all.

She loved him before she knew it. She intended, of course, to love him for the rest of the very short time she had left.

But once again, things didn't quite go the way she planned.

* * *

She knew something was different the moment he appeared in her open doorway, hands already on his lapels like he did when he was drawing on his title or was nervous, that slow, sweet smile distracted and pinched.

"Ms. Disarro," he greeted, ever formal. (It had become a point of teasing between them over the past year; that, in spite of the depth of their conversations and the amount of time they spent together, in spite of the fact that she was certain he was falling in love with her just as she was with him, he never addressed her by her first name, because he was still her doctor and she was still his patient and it would be inappropriate.)

"Doctor."

"I would like to discuss something with you, if you have a moment."

She nodded agreeably, but he didn't start right away. Instead, he took the time to shuffle over to the chair near her bed and jostle it painstakingly into position, wincing a little at the same noise it always made, only to change his mind about sitting in it at the last second and draw himself up, hands going back to his lapels as if to remind her that he was in fact an actual doctor.

And then he rambled a bunch of technical things that she didn't fully understand. There were two things from his very long-winded explanation that she did understand, however, very clearly: he had been working to find a cure for her, and he had succeeded—or at least he thought so. He was young, lacking experience, and this theory of his, while based on cutting edge research and several known factors, had never been tested on anyone; other doctors he'd consulted during his research were at best hesitant (he assured her that they agreed his research seemed solid, they just mostly didn't trust his youth). John's cure, it seemed, was the definition of daring and experimental—foolhardy and risky, some might say. But if she wanted to try it—because she was dying anyway, he didn't say but they both knew, and was therefore a perfect candidate for untried, risky procedures—if she wanted to try, he thought the other doctors could be persuaded on the strength of his research.

Three things, then, that she understood: he had been spending all of his "free" time and energy (that is, anything not already spent with her or at his job) on research for her, he had proven himself as brilliant and daring as she'd known him to be by seemingly succeeding, and it was entirely up to her whether to test this cure of his or not.

"Do you think it'll work?" she asked when he'd slowed to a halt, not quite meeting her eyes, with his shoulders drawn in and tense.

He did meet her eyes, then, earnest and hopeful and mostly confident as always. "I do," he said carefully.

She felt those words—in the way he meant them and the way he didn't—right where her heart was beating inside her chest. The damaged heart that John was going to fix. The heart that was already his to do with as he pleased. The heart that was completely at peace as she smiled at him. "Okay."

He started to smile, slow and brilliant, and her heart fluttered. "Okay?" he repeated.

"One condition," she continued. He nodded, wide-eyed, brain already spinning through what he needed to do. "Marry me." And his brain stuttered and stopped. "Before the surgery," she added. "Marry me."

"Yes," he said, a little dazed. "Yes, of course. Whenever you want." And he smiled bigger than she'd ever seen him smile and lit up the room.

* * *

The procedure, as Tara understood it in layman's terms, was essentially attaching all the various parts that make up a heart alongside hers in order to help it with its various deficiencies.

("So I'll basically have two hearts?" she'd asked in the quiet after she and John had agreed to the procedure and the marriage respectively.

"You already do," he'd said, with a sly smile, one hand resting on his own chest. It was the sappiest he'd ever been.)

While John was in endless meetings persuading his bosses of the strength of his idea and tracking down the things he would need to build her second heart, she explained this to her knitting group—composed of others in the long-term ward and occasionally a volunteer or two who, as Tara's dear friend and neighbor and knitting instructor Irma put it, "actually think we need their help." One of the others had told the group a legend about human beings being born in the beginning with four arms and four legs and two heads and having been split in half because they were too powerful and soul mates being that other half, and about the shape people call a "heart" being two actual hearts put together, like it maybe was back then, like it's meant to be with a soulmate metaphorically.

Tara had entertained herself with the romanticism of that idea, particularly in her circumstances, but had assumed the others had more or less forgotten, until the wedding shower the others in the ward had thrown her. It was decorated entirely in pairs of hearts and two of hearts playing cards (courtesy of her poker group), with a cake made to look like an anatomical heart with Frankenstein attachments. Irma, sharp-witted and practical, had knit her a pillow that she could hug to her chest after surgery that looked like two anatomically-correct hearts stitched together in such a way as to form the shape of a "heart," with a pocket inside for ice or heating pads.

* * *

She had a moment of doubt when it occurred to her, late at night when she was alone in the mostly-dark, that she would never truly be _well_ , that her heart would always have faults and that something could go wrong again. She would need to see doctors regularly for the rest of her life (not John, because apparently having a husband who is also your doctor is somehow a "conflict of interest"). And there were things . . .

Well, having been an only child and stifled by propriety and the ever-present instruction to "grow up," she'd always dreamed of a house absolutely bursting with children—her children, their friends, neighbors, the whole lot—and John, who had grown up in a fairly large family and lost the majority of them at a young age, had similar goals, she knew from a few conversations with both him and his sister.

"What if I can't have children?" she burst out one day. "I mean, what if being pregnant is too much for my heart still? What if—"

He put his hands over hers in a show of familiarity that was becoming more common. "We could always adopt," he suggested easily. "And I'd be happy with just you, either way."

* * *

Her parents objected. Strenuously. Over the entire interval between proposals and wedding and surgery.

They objected to the surgery, to her "being used as a guinea pig."

They objected to John, scandalously both ten years her senior and her doctor, someone she'd only known for a little over a year and only in the context of her illness.

They objected to the marriage, "sudden" and immediately before the already life-altering surgery.

They objected to the wedding arrangements even more when she'd insisted on being married in the hospital room that had become her sanctuary and a testament to their love rather than a church, when she considered not being married in white (she suggested a hospital gown, partly for the amusement of her mother's reaction and partly so that they would be less appalled by any other idea), when Irma volunteered to officiate.

They objected out of the same caution and adherence to propriety that had driven her mad as a child, but this time it couldn't dampen her spirits.

* * *

She and John were married two days before the procedure in the room where they'd met, bathed in colored light against the backdrop of origami bees and butterflies and flowers, under their stars and entirely in their own world.

She wore white, mostly, and John looked absolutely dashing in an old-fashioned suit. But there were delicate butterflies of every color on her train and in the crown of flowers in her hair and a bee broach pinned above her heart and John wore a vest beneath his jacket with a map of the world on it and there were constellations embroidered on the inside of his jacket and on his tie and a paper butterfly tucked into his pocket alongside his bee embroidered handkerchief and his heart-monitor braces were under it all. He wore the pink socks with anatomically correct hearts on them.

Her father escorted her down the hall and across the room (from Irma's room next door, where she'd gotten ready so John wouldn't see her); he cried when he saw her in her dress and said he was so happy that she'd made it to this day, which made her cry, and they blubbered their way through the happy occasion just like a proper church wedding.

Irma didn't officiate, but she was a bridesmaid alongside John's sister Susan and Tara's mother as matron of honor.

It was the happiest moment of Tara Disarro's life, and if she died in surgery she'd die happy and fulfilled, even never having stepped foot outside the country she was born in. Because she had friends and family and John, and she'd found more color than she could ever have imagined she'd find in a hospital in boring old England. Because she'd learned that life wasn't about where you are, it's about who's there with you and what you do with it.

* * *

When Tara properly woke from surgery for the first time back in her room at the hospital, it was to John's hand in hers and a burst of color as the warm yellow hues of sunset splashed through stained glass and all across a paper swarm of butterflies. Her John was reading, open book propped on a knee, with a frown of concentration between his eyebrows that instantly made her want to reach out and smooth it away. Her hand started to rise to perform the action but fell short at the twinge of _wrong_ that shot across her chest. Her gasp drew her husband's attention and the book fell to the floor as he moved to the bed, sitting beside her with one hand brushing aside her hair, the other still in her grasp.

She'd forgotten this feeling somehow, the feeling of waking from sedation with her skin stitched together over broken-apart bones, with nothing quite settled where it should be deep inside where nothing was ever supposed to be disturbed. Her other hand rose to her chest, finding the thick bandage and the ridge of new injury over old scars.

"Every time—" she tried, and had to stop and clear her throat. John offered her a sip of water. "Every time," she tried again, pleased when her voice came out a little thin and breathy, but steady and _there_. "Every time I have one of these surgeries, this scar gets a little uglier," she tried to joke, absently rubbing at the ridge of it over her sternum.

John's hand came over hers, enfolding it briefly before nudging it aside to run a sure thumb over the spot himself in the most intimate gesture he'd made yet. "You're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen," he said. And then his eyes met hers and lit with the sunrise of his slow, sweet smile. And he kissed her.

"You're going to live a long and happy life," he whispered into the space between their lips, after. "I swear it." His eyes were the solid grey of unmoving rock, settled and at peace.

Her beating heart swelled inside her, bigger than should be possible, staring into those unfathomable depths. "Kiss me," she whispered. And he did.

* * *

Tara Disarro wanted to see the world, so she stole a doctor and she ran away.


End file.
